In this research project, I explored how the United States (U.S.) has redefined the concept of ‘imminent threat’ to relax the rules for anticipatory use of armed force against insurgent groups.In particular, two new definitions of imminent threat have changed the conduct of specific combat activities: drone strikes and ground combat operations.
In the first part of the article, I examined how the Obama administration redefined, in late 2011, the concept of imminent threat in jus ad bellum in order to establish the legal basis for targeted killings of individuals suspected of being senior leaders of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups. My objective was to show how the Obama administration changed the definition of imminent threat by eliminating two of its key traditional components – that is, the immediacy and certainty of the threat. The new – “flexible” and “broad” – definition of imminent threat enabled the U.S. military to start launching anticipatory attacks with unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, against vaguely defined threats. By describing imminent threats as continuous threats that were present at any time because terrorists supposedly continuously planned attacks against the U.S., the new definition of imminent threat significantly broadened the temporal limits within which the U.S. military was permitted to conduct military operations, including drone strikes. The U.S. military was permitted to launch continuous armed attacks against presumed continuous imminent threats without having to collect evidence showing when and where such threats were about to emerge. Moreover, the new definition of imminent threat also widened the geographical scope of anticipatory “self-defense” operations. Given that members of Al Qaeda and associated forces operated in dozens of countries around the world, the new concept of imminent threat enabled the U.S. military to launch military operations in all of those countries. Under the new doctrine, it became irrelevant whether the countries in which members of Al Qaeda and their affiliated forces were hiding were at war with the U.S.
”[T]he redefinition of imminent threat in ground combat operations led to an increase in violence against civilians”
In the second part of the research, I examined how the Bush administration redefined the concept of imminent threat in ground combat operations in 2005. The redefined concept was unveiled in the U.S. Rules of Engagement, thedirectives delineating the circumstances and limitations under which U.S. troops are allowed to use force against enemy troops. Crucially, both the Bush and Obama administrations embraced a redefinition of imminent threat that abandoned one of its key traditional elements – that is, the immediacy of the threat. The new definition was used to relax the rules for anticipatory self-defense in ground combat operations, in particular in kill-or-capture missions or night raids. The expanded notion of imminence enabled U.S. troops to categorize as an imminent threat a range of movements and actions that did not represent an immediate threat but merely indicated that a threat might emerge at some unspecified moment in the future. For example, such movements and actions included: using a mobile phone in the vicinity of U.S. troops; digging a hole, particularly at night, in the vicinity of a road; stepping out of a house during a night raid; fleeing from the scene of a night raid; possessing a weapon. With such broad threat categorizations, the line dividing civilians and legitimate military targets became blurred, which increased the risk for civilians getting killed or injured.
New definitions of imminent threat prevented the application of the principles of necessity and proportionality during the pre-emptive use of force against perceived imminent threats. In order to show how the U.S. military failed to observe both principles in drone strikes, I focused on the principles of necessity and proportionality incorporated in jus ad bellum, the norms regulating the use of armed force in international relations. In addition, I examined the principles of necessity and proportionality in jus in bello, the norms governing the conduct of hostilities in armed conflicts, in order to explain how the U.S. military ignored both principles in ground combat operations.
One of the key findings of the research is that the redefinition of imminent threat in ground combat operations led to an increase in violence against civilians. The too-broad definition of imminent threat enabled U.S. troops to be more flexible in deciding when to pull the trigger in “self-defense” engagements, which led to civilians being more often put in danger of getting killed or injured. While it is true that imminent threat determinations were always, to a certain extent, subjective, the new concept of imminent threat allowed excessive subjectivity that significantly undermined civilian protection.
Judith Butler. New York: Verso, 2020; pp. ix – 209. $26.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781788732765
In its shift away from traditional approaches to security studies that implied work done through the frame of war and a state-centric approach, debates regarding the discursive and theoretical implications of the concepts, grammars, methodologies, and schools that traditionally upheld the architectonics of critical security studies have dominated recent scholarship in the field. To paraphrase Columba Peoples and Nick Vaughan-Williams, as the field has broadened and deepened its agenda, studying security’s relationship to the environment, the economy, and the socio-political sphere, while also incorporating new referent objects (e.g., institutions, human individuals, and the biosphere), “what is common” across contemporary critical security studies scholarship
“is an insistence on the important of paying close attention to the ways in which the discourse of pre/post 9/11 world works politically in order to justify particular policies and interests” (p. 9).
In her most recent book-length project, The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political, Judith Butler takes back up the argument concerning non-violence’s semantic and pragmatic ambiguity that she began in Frames of War, arguing that discourses concerning violence (by way of defining violence and/or using violence) often do work politically and affectively to justify particular policies and interests. As a text that carefully explores some of the field’s most important vocabulary – i.e., violence and non-violence – this manuscript compliments Butler’s continued significance to critical security studies, adding novel utility to concepts like grievability, performativity, and vulnerability that have helped shape the form and arc of contemporary scholarship in security studies writ large.
”This book is especially a call to ask oneself not whether nonviolence and resistance are necessary, but how and where one should resist in order to save lives”
Tracing the double-helix of critiquing violence and doing violence, in The Force of Nonviolence Butler argues against the false binaries often erected between aggressive action (violence) and passive paralysis (nonviolence). Such binaries empty nonviolence of any agency and are a byproduct of powers taking advantage of the dialectical movement of violence and language through time, a play at turning resistance to constructed explanations of what is right and what is violent into acquiescence at best and execution at worst. Butler’s thesis in this project is that “the power of nonviolence, its force, is found in the modes of resistance to a form of violence that regularly hides its true name” (p. 201). Nonviolence, in other words, is not the absence of violence, and it does not “necessarily emerge from a pacific or calm part of the soul” (p. 21). Instead, it is less a “moral position” than a “social and political practice undertaken in concert” with others, a rhetorical and material (re)action which exposes and resists the infrastructures of “justified” violence, infrastructures that take advantage of the obfuscating nature of beginnings and ends, bringing into the light those bodies, the ungrievable, the marginalized, that, by their very negation, are condemned to subtend what Butler calls war logics of individuality, sovereignty, and rule of law – logics, in other words, that emphasize self-sufficiency and the kill-or-be-killed ethos so popular in traditional security studies and the West.
Over the course of an introduction, four chapters, and a postscript, Butler moves from diagnosing violence and nonviolence as always oscillating between conflicting political frameworks, to arguing that a critique of subjectivity and individuality is necessary to dispel the narrative fantasies that are used to justify such frameworks, to finally an appeal to recalibrate nonviolence as a style of exposure and critique that reveals systems of violence and oppression rather than just condemning individual acts of aggression and erasure. As Butler emphasizes in the “Post-Script,” “whether we are caught up in rage or love” (p. 204) both of which are drives that can be used to subvert or reify frameworks that detain, incarcerate, expel, and execute living bodies, a commitment to nonviolence is not a disavowal of violence’s negating capability, but a way of using violence’s negation against those structures that use violence to negate other lives in the name of conquest, material and surplus accumulation, and Othering. Nonviolence is indeed a force, then, not a rejection of action but a style of engagement with the negating power of violence itself.
”In a year of political uncertainty and pandemic, with questions asking after what is to be done, Butler’s work in The Force of Nonviolence is particularly appropriate for our moment in time”
Reading The Force of Nonviolence entails an encounter with the concept of violence at two levels. On the one hand, Butler seems to argue that the ontology of violence, like the ontology of language, seems premised on the negative, a negating of this not that, which is inescapable insofar as the capacity to negate establishes the conditions for life’s diversity and evolution and language’s grammar and capacity for definition. This is to say that the potential to call something violent (that is, do violence)and so to negate it, is endemic to the process of living and being. On the other hand, Butler argues that a particular enactment of this ontological negation can be (un)consciously weaponized by systems, like governments, in order to intentionally 1) convince people that there are others who violently threaten the “safety” and “security” of “law and order,” and that 2) these others deserve to be killed with impunity and without recognition of loss (sans grievability). In my reading, it’s the “conscious weaponization” of negation-as-violence that Butler wants to grapple with at the discursive level of interplay between the individual and the social, while recognizing the indelibility of the ontology of negation, suggesting nonviolence as a way to reroute the (un)conscious weaponization of negation away from death and destruction motivated by racism, sexism, and so on, and toward efforts to dismantle the infrastructures of those same life-negating -isms (in addition to the already mentioned: militarism, nationalism, positivism, realism, liberalism, and so on) that do unnecessary harm to demographics singled out because of how Western narratives of colonization and imperialism, tied up with state-sovereignty and militarism, have depicted such groups as expendable, less-than-human, even a threat to humanism as a concept and a practice.
Judith Butler’s book will be useful to those scholars interested in violence and non-violence in general, but also will aid those interested in post-positivism’s and critical constructivism’s influence on the field of critical security studies, particularly with how the rhetoric of violence and the violence of rhetoric found at the hinge between traditional and critical security studies often establish a parallax that confuses the difference between the two lines of inquiry, perhaps especially in contemporary critical security scholarship. For a broader audience, academic and otherwise, I recommend this text for its careful analysis of the terms – violence, racism, law – we find used, explicitly and implicitly, in every policy-building situation, politically, militarily, and otherwise. This book is especially a call to ask oneself not whether nonviolence and resistance are necessary, but how and where one should resist in order to save lives, including, Butler would say, your own. In a year of political uncertainty and pandemic, with questions asking after what is to be done, Butler’s work in The Force of Nonviolence is particularly appropriate for our moment in time – a time of grief, a time of loss, a time pregnant with the potential for radical, non-violent change.
References
Butler, Judith. (2020) The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political. New York: Verso.
Peoples, Columba, and Nick Vaughan-Williams. (2014). Critical Security Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
In 2008, the first global seed bank—the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV)—went into operation. Even before its opening, the SGSV had already attracted media attention and provoked all kinds of theological and eschatological parables.
The SGSV quickly received the nickname ‘Doomsday Vault’ while some commentators spoke of a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for plants. In fact, the purpose and location of this particular storage facility are reminiscent of an apocalyptic theme in a motion picture in which humanity tries to prepare itself for the end of the world. Built in the inhospitable environment of an Arctic desert on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, halfway between the mainland of Norway and the North Pole, the SGSV was designed to preserve the biodiversity of global agriculture and thus ensure global food security against future catastrophes. National plant research institutes and gene banks around the world working on the creation of useful new plant varieties have the opportunity to send copies of their variety collections to Spitsbergen and have them stored in the vault. In the event that the national collections are destroyed in the course of technical accidents, natural disasters or social upheavals, the vault offers the option to restore lost diversity and thus the possibility of genetic variety breeding on which modern agriculture so heavily depends.
”If damage to the planet such as the extinction of species is already occurring, technologies such as the SGSV promise to postpone irreversibility.”
On the homepage of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, one of the main sources of finance for the SGSV, the task is clearly outlined: ‘The Vault is the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply, offering options for future generations to overcome the challenges of climate change and population growth. It will secure, for centuries, millions of seeds representing every important crop variety available in the world today. It is the final back up’.
The article argues that the SGSV expresses a security rationality that could be described as a “politics of reversibility”. The concept of reversibility refers to a slightly different time-theoretical problem than the ongoing debates in Critical Security Studies on the different modes of anticipating the future. While the latter are more concerned with the problem of preparing and preventing, the problem of reversibility is about how long a past event can still be reversed. Referring to the time-theoretical concept of the “doubled present” of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann it is argued that the SGSV generates an extended present within the passing time, in which past events can be treated as present and thus be corrected. By removing the seeds from their ecological relationships and then freezing them, the metabolic processes of life are halted and its irreversible process of becoming is reduced to a minimum. This gives plant scientists a possibility that life does not actually provide for: to return to any stage of evolution and reverse the extinction itself.
In this way, the analysis of the politics of reversibility contributes to a further understanding of how life is secured in the times of the Anthropocene. The politics of reversibility seems to be the logical form of security politics at a time where the catastrophe is no longer waiting in the future but is already present. If damage to the planet such as the extinction of species is already occurring, technologies such as the SGSV promise to postpone irreversibility. Against this background, the SGSV seems to follow a modernist-reductionist paradigm of conservation that feels to be completely unsuitable to respond to the complex ecological problems of the Anthropocene. In the end, is it not precisely this kind of reification of life that caused us the mess of the Anthropocene? Although this is undoubtedly correct, I hesitate to reject the gene bank as a security technology per se. In view of the speed at which the loss of species is proceeding, the question, as Thom van Dooren puts it, can no longer be whether or not to bank, but how to situate the technology of the gene bank in such a way that it not only serves the security needs of the global North. If this can be achieved, the politics of reversibility could indeed become one of the arts of living on a damaged planet.
In Hamas’ 2004 poster of suicide bomber Reem al-Riyashi, she poses for the camera holding a rifle her in left hand and her son in the other. al-Riyashi killed four Israelis and herself in a joint Hamas and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades bombing on the Gaza-Israel border.
The Savior of the Erez Crossing Operation executed on January 14, 2004 Al-Qassam Martyr Reem Salem AlRiyashi,” Hamas, 2004; Filasteen al-Muslimah
Over twenty years earlier, and nearly 5,000 miles away, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) produced a similar poster featuring a nearly identically positioned militant with her gun and child. These are markedly different organizations, and the former rarely includes women on the front lines. But these groups employed the same ‘armed mother’ imagery in their visual messaging, as part of a cross-national trend. In my recent Security Dialogue article, I explore why and how militant organizations across conflicts use this imagery to contextualize, justify, and humanize political violence.
Women’s
participation can be fruitful for militant groups. Because women are assumed to
be non-violent and peripheral to conflict, their participation can humanize
rebellion. For example, in Nepal Maoists “mobilized women to give the message
that the armed conflict was a demand on all people; such a noble war that even
women would fight, supporting and sympathizing with it” (Dahal 2015: 188). In
El Salvador, some families reported being more comfortable letting their
children join the FMLN when approached by female recruiters because they viewed
women as less threatening and more trustworthy (Viterna 2013).
But
generally, women’s armed involvement still violates social and political gender
expectations. Militant groups risk backlash from community
members, and even comparatively egalitarian organizations frame women’s
involvement as evidence that the state destroyed social order (c.f. Viterna
2013). I conclude that ‘armed mother’ imagery is a tool for reconciling these
complex dynamics in militant publicity. By leveraging life-giving as the
‘natural’ role for women, these images signal violent disruption of everyday
life and authorize political violence in response. But they also stress the
temporariness of gender role expansion, promising and preserving a ‘return to
normal.’ Armed mothers therefore contextualize women’s violence and use those
narratives to legitimize rebellion. While we do not know how well these
narratives work in shaping people’s views on militancy, this approach is so
popular that some groups use ‘stock images’ of armed mothers from other
conflicts in their own outreach, and ‘armed mothers’ even appear in posters
from groups who exclude women from front line participation.
In my Security Dialogue article, I demonstrate this visual practice using 16 ‘armed mother’ posters from six diverse conflicts. This research offers a window into militants’ publicity campaigns. It illuminates how politically violent groups perceive and explain women’s participation and emphasizes the role gender plays in organizational dynamics. Moreover, this work highlights the importance of visual scholarship and its practical implications for understanding the contextualization and legitimation of political violence.
Works Cited
Dahal
S (2015) Challenging the Boundaries: The Narratives of the Female Ex Combatants
in Nepal. In Shekhawat S (ed). Challenging Gender in Violence and Post-Conflict
Reintegration, Palgrave MacMillan
Viterna
J (2013) Women in War: The Micro-Processes of Mobilization in El Salvador.
London: Oxford University Press
One of the grounding assumptions of liberal democratic politics is that the open flow of information—including exposure of state secrets where necessary—enables people to hold states accountable for their actions.
At the current moment, however, the effectiveness of exposure, as well as the broader politics of truth, have become a site of intense concern on both sides of the Atlantic. The United Kingdom is now heading into an uncertain “Brexit” bolstered by popular support despite a campaign tainted by easily disproven claims,[1] while the United States Senate has recently voted to acquit in the impeachment trial of President Trump, despite the exposure of numerous impeachable offenses. These apparent failures of truth-telling have led to much hand-wringing about the role of truth and evidence in the political arena.[2]
My article in Security Dialogue, “Truth and consequences? Reconceptualizing the politics of exposure”, was prompted by another seeming failure of truth. Why had the exposure of the use of torture in the U.S. war on terror not led to a more significant reckoning with these violations of human rights? Seeking to answer this question led me to rethink how we conceptualize exposure and its effects.
While exposure is commonly understood as a switch that takes us from secrecy to openness, I argue that we must instead think of exposure as a process that is contingent and contentious, with contention over the meaning of what has been exposed, and its significance, at the center. Exposure is not simply the release of new information: this is only the first step in what might then lead to what I call revelation: a collection recognition that something new has become publicly known.
Despite the presence of hints, allegations, evidence, and even acknowledgements of its use in the public sphere, torture functioned more like a “public secret”[3] than an acknowledged fact throughout the early years of the War on Terror. This persisted until the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal, which marked the revelation that torture was occurring. I argue that Abu Ghraib was a transformative moment not just because of the release of dramatic images, but because these images fundamentally disrupted existing discourses of torture as something that might be done in a controlled, professional, and effective manner. In other words, the effective exposure, at which point the knowledge that torture had occurred became collectively acknowledged, required a disruption of collective understanding, and not simply the release of information.
Reconceptualizing exposure as a political and interpretive process has potential applicability to developing a broader politics of knowledge. This discussion may analyze phenomena ranging from how and when “whisper networks” circulating information about sexual harassers turn into public accusations, to how a politician who seems to delight in openly breaking norms might suddenly find himself under official investigation. Only this broader approach, rather than a focus on discrete “secrets” and “exposures,” can help us understand the changing role of “truth”, “evidence” and information in politics.
The US-Mexico border occupies a central place in American politics. In our conversations about international security, the continued importance of race, violence, and ‘othering’ in the borderlands has only heightened in the light of events such as the El Paso shootings, racist anti-Mexican rhetoric from the Trump administration, and a surge in anti-Latin@ hate crimes throughout the US.
Blood plasma. Photo credit: Jagrap, CCBY-ND.2.0 licence, via Flickr: https://flic.kr/p/8ryKJm
While this intense political struggle around who belongs with the US rages, mundane, daily life at the border continues. People continue to cross the border on a regular basis, as part of their daily or weekly routines, and one reason some Mexicanas/os are crossing into the U.S. is to sell their blood plasma at US donation centers. The plasma industry is an enormous global market, and the US is the major supplier – “the OPEC of plasma”. Arguably, this is because many donation centres in the US pay their donors. If you donate at the maximum frequency (twice a week), you can earn up to 400 US dollars a month – for donors like Fernando, who crosses the border twice a week from Juarex to El Paso, this is around double the income a factory job brings.
“Studying plasma donation allows us to interrogate how bodies are made more or less secure in international politics”
In my article, I argue that within a racist political climate where arguments around ‘the wall’ continue to burn, plasma donation provides a micro-site where a wider political struggle over the value of Mexicana/o lives is played out. Studying plasma donation allows us to interrogate how bodies are made more or less secure in international politics, by making visible how life and death are distributed and governed. Looking at practices of cross-border plasma donation gives us an opportunity to cut a window into a wider politics of racialized living and dying within the US. It can help us examine how understandings of race intersect with the governance of biological life, by exploring the discourses that emerge about a particular class of biological matter – plasma and plasma products. My article uses feminist technoscience studies (FTS) as its point of entry into these discussions around the governance of life. FTS is a body of feminist literature that has long explored the relationship between bodies and technology. Using FTS as a way into this conversation shows us how the distribution of life and death is not only played out in exceptional spaces of violence, but also in small, mundane daily interactions – such as donating plasma. FTS guides us towards questions not around who lives and who dies in international politics, but for who lives for whom, and how these relationships are governed.
In the article I therefore examine the two dominant
framings of Mexicana/o plasma donation (in media and in industry literatures)
to explore how life and death are apportioned between people in these practices.
Firstly, I show how Mexicana/o plasma donors are presented as sites where
biological life (in the form of plasma) can be extracted and distributed to
others. Secondly, I show how Mexicana/o
donors are simultaneously discussed as dangerous, presented as posing a threat
to the safety of the plasma supply through an increased risk infectious disease.
I argue that both of these framings are profoundly and violently objectifying,
rooted in racist and colonial histories. Within them, Mexicana/o donors are
framed as having value solely in relation to how they can make other bodies
live or die. The worth of their own lives and bodies are not visible in these
stories; only the benefit or detriment they may hold for others.
Studying these discourses in the context of
plasma donation shows us that we cannot ignore the importance of race in
forming our understanding of what/who counts as ‘human.’ Even after plasma is
separated from the bodies of donors, a link remains between the donated plasma
and the body it came from. Rather than becoming generically ‘human’ plasma, it
is still understood and managed in specifically racialized ways. In the
article, I argue this shows us that there is no generic or universal ‘human’.
Instead, there are only ever specific humans.
Studying plasma donation can therefore help us understand how ideas about race
produces forms of life as different, and how this impacts their relative worth.
How do relations affect the behaviour of those agents entangled in them? With the metaphor of modern Western dating practices in mind, the early days of relationships are marked by drinks, cosy dinners and outdoor journeys. As the relationship progresses, the existence of one person becomes articulated around its entanglement to the existence of the other. All of a sudden, individuals see less of their friends, family, and colleagues. Why these spontaneous changes in the everydayness of these beings? Our response to this question is that relations compromise the agency of those beings in the relation.
National Archives and Records Administration [Public domain] via Wikimedia
Beyond
the dating metaphor, our article seeks to question how actors in peacebuilding
settings see their purposeful agency compromised. We analyse this phenomenon in
the context of growing complexity stemming from the countless entanglements
between actors. In turn, this argument questions the suitability of goal-oriented
peace agendas designed to be achieved by autonomous actors, such as the UN, through
linear and purposeful strategies.
The
inspiration behind this paper lays in field observations developed on UN
peacebuilding performance in Sierra Leone as well as on conversations with UN
(and non-UN) peacebuilding policy experts engaged in the conflict-affected
cases of Burundi and the Central African Republic. In addition, reflections on
the paper are also informed by further interviews with peacebuilding officers from
the New York-based UN headquarters. All these experiences in the domain of
peacebuilding, and more specifically on how the UN copes with it, enabled us to
explore broader issues related to complexity, relationality and agency that are
object of study in our article.
“UN inter-agency intra-coordination in the peacebuilding domain remains a ‘nightmare’ “
In brief, we realised how the growing number of diverse actors, agencies and stakeholders entangled in countless relationships in the above-mentioned post-conflict scenarios saw their agential condition eroded and limited by spontaneous, unpredictable and disoriented interactions. As the head of a Freetown-based peacebuilding-oriented NGO revealed: ‘we have so many civil society organizations, so the UN is so confused who to deal with…. Civil society is fragmented; we do not have that unified body through which we could channel national issues such as peacebuilding, governance, health, etc. So the UN don’t know who to target’. Put more blatantly, as a former Bangui-based officer from the MINUSCA (United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic) expressed in conversation, UN inter-agency intra-coordination in the peacebuilding domain remains a ‘nightmare’.
As a result of this, rather than autonomous and purposeful agents, peacebuilding actors like the UN seem captured by messy and entangled practices of undetermined transformation, reinvention and adaptation, much like the throes of an early relationship unconsciously and unwittingly transitioning towards loving entangled dependency. Agency is thus non-static. In turn, actors’ strategic goals are constantly trumped by these uncertain relations in this increasingly complex milieu, to the point of making these goals ever evolving, vague and even unreachable. Ultimately, we suggest that the relational nature of peacebuilding actors, which does not leave room for linear, progressive and teleological narratives, opens up the possibility for alternative practices sensitive with the fact that the unpredictability of developments in social reality surpasses the autonomous purposeful aspirations of its protagonists.
Gaby Zipfel, Kirsten Campbell and Regina Muhlhauser (eds), New Delhi: Zubaan Books.
In Plain Sight: Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, a collection of essays edited by Gaby Zipfel, Regina Muhlhauser, and Kirsten Campbell, offers a synthesis of the work by members of the International Research Group Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC), an inter-discilplinary and multi-institutional initiative founded in 2010, and a summary of the state of the field of research examining sexual violence in armed conflict. The book emerged from a conference commemorating 40 years since the publication of Susan Brownmiller’s foundational book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. This endeavor addresses the extent to which our understanding of sexual violence has developed since Against Our Will mainstreamed the notion that sexual violence and rape represent politically powerful tools to control women.
A central objective of this book is to revisit and recenter theory in the study of sexual violence in armed conflict. The authors note that despite increased attention, “essential questions such as the practices and politics of ‘doing gender,’ to the intertwined nature of violence and sexuality, have increasingly disappeared from public political, and academic discourse about sexual violence inarmed conflict.”[1] The book thus represents an effort to re-gender the study of sexual violence in armed conflict and several of the contributions interrogate the relatonship between masculinities and sexual violence.
This interdisciplinary work draws from a wide range of disciplines that contribute to SVAC, including history, sociology, and cultural studies. The volume includes historical essays and reviews of modern manifestations of sexual violence in armed conflict, but also contributions that conceptualizes the relationship between the performance of gender and sexual violence, and reviews of how such violence is portrayed in popular culture and the media. The book is organized into four sections: War/Power, Violence/Sexuality, Gender/Engendering, Visibility/Invisibility. Across more than two dozen chapters, the book provides interesting theorhetical approaches to the nature of sexual violence in conflict and its relationship to other forms of violence and sexual violence in times of peace. Additionally, the book includes several case studies of sexual violence in armed conflict, including an examination of Japanese “comfort women,” sexual violence in the World Wars, the DRC, and how the notion of sexual violence shapes Hindu nationalism in India.
”the book succeeds in enabling a conversation between authors who directly address the same topic”
The book is at its strongest when it puts members of the SVAC community in conversation with one another. This is done most clearly in one of the introductory chapters, “Gaps and Traps: The Politics of Generating Knowledge on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict.” This chapter allows multiple authors to respond to the same question, bringing to bear their case specific knowledge to discuss the different approaches to conceptualizing SVAC, how it has changed over time, as well as the methodological issues relating to approaching sources when researching such a sensitive subject.
Generally, the book succeeds in enabling a conversation between authors who directly address the same topic . This is done particularly well in three chapters on the role of the threat of sexual violence and the performance of gender in Hindu nationalism. Sen’s “‘Stabbing, Slicing, Wounding,” Urgan Hindu Nationalism, Public Knife-Distribution and the Politics of Sexual Vulnerability in Mumbai, India,” Mlinarevic’s response, “Nationalism and the Patriarchal Order,” and the final piece on “The Ambiguous Role of Women in Self Defense,” by Sen provide a fascinating back and forth on a moder manifestation of politics, performing gender, and the ways in which the implicit (or explicit) threat of sexual violence characterizes women’s lives and modern political appeals in India.
This book also makes physical and intellectual space for several standout contributions that do not fit neatly into existing disciplinary silos. Yang’s ‘Finding the ‘Map of Memory’: Testimony of the Survivors of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan’ is both substantively illuminating and provides an invaluable discussion of the difficulties of data collection on such intimate and personal experiences of violence. Similarly, Du Toit’s “Resisting the Symbolic Power of (War) Rape,” which discusses how the current treatment of wartime rape in discourse may make this violence more common and impactful, provides a meta-approach to our discussions of sexual violence that is often absent from other studies.
Though the book collects a number of different theoretical approaches to understanding sexual violence in armed conflict from the members of the collective, there are missed opportunities to engage recent and compelling work on this subject. For example, engagement with Holly Porter’s 2016 book After Rape: Violence, Justice, and Social Harmony in Uganda, which discusses how the same act of sexual violence can be interpretted differently based on the relationship between the victim and the assailant and other contextual factors, Anne-Kathrin Kreft’s work on women’s post-conflict mobilization on the basis of shared threat of sexual violence, and Milli Lake’s work on gender justice and advocacy in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa would have put this work into conversation with theory-grounded, empirically driven work, and would have strengthened the book’s empirical and theorhetical contributions.[2] Engaging with such work would have allowed the authors to more critically evaluate how victims of sexual assault conceptualize their experience and incorporate these perspectives into theories about what differentiates sexual violence in conflict from sexual violence in times of peace.
Similarly, many of the contributions would have been strengthened by engaging with some of the concepts developed in recent years by comparativist political science research on the subject of sexual violence during conflict. The differentiation between the use of sexual violence as an endorsed policy as compared to a tolerated practice for example, could have added nuance to many of the contributions in the book examining specific instances of sexual violence.[3] Doing so may have provided a platform for these authors to contribute to a growing literature on how organizational culture and structure impacts the nature of armed groups’ interactions with civilians. It would have certainly given the authors the opportunity to more thoroughly interrogate the variation in the degree and nature of sexual violence across conflicts identified in the book’s introductory notes.
”A shortcoming of the book — and a struggle for many edited volumes — is that it was somewhat disjointed.”
A shortcoming of the book — and a struggle for many edited volumes — is that it was somewhat disjointed. The book’s organization by theme rather than issue area results in isolated discussions of some case studies in multiple chapters. This is particularly frustrating as a reader, because the book puts authors into conversation with one another to great effect in other sections of the book.
Ultimately, this book offers a contribution for those looking to immerse themselves in some of the most recent feminist theorizing on sexual violence in conflict. Those interested in understanding the methodological challenges to researching sexual violence in armed conflict and how approaches to this subject have changed over time will benefit from the introductory chapter, which provides a distilled and diverse summary of some of the most contentious debates in the field.
[2] Porter, Holly. After rape: Violence, justice, and social harmony in Uganda. Vol. 53. Cambridge University Press, 2016; Kreft, Anne-Kathrin. “Responding to sexual violence: Women’s mobilization in war.” Journal of Peace Research 56, no. 2 (2019): 220-233; Lake, Milli May. Strong NGOs and weak states: pursuing gender justice in the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
[3] Cohen, Dara Kay, Amelia Hoover Green, and Elisabeth Jean Wood. “Wartime sexual violence.” USIP Special Report 617 (2013).
In her book From Righteousness to Far Right, Emma Mc Cluskey brings an anthropological revision of critical security studies and offers an ethnographic contribution for understanding the securitisation of migration. The book comes as an alternative to the narrow perspective of early schools of critical security studies (Copenhagen, Paris and Aberystwyth), which so far fail to address the legitimisation of ‘threatening migrant’ and xenophobia to day-to-day life, practices and the normalisation far-right politics towards migrants and refugees. The author moves away from a focus on high politics, e.g. official documents and discourses, and brings a new political-anthropological perspective to investigate security and migration and provide alternative realms of understanding everyday life practices, under, as the author states, a broader politics of humanitarianism and righteousness.
More specifically, the author Mc Cluskey guides the reader through the evolution of critical security studies and international political sociology and highlights the rising need of broadening the (in)security agenda beyond state focus institutions by engaging the idea of international as a specific problem. With the current literature perceiving the problem of (in)security by focusing on processes and relations in the level of agents, what is excluded, according to the author, are realms that have been ignored so far as being insignificant, that of ordinary people’ day-to-day processes and practices.
In order to address this gap in the literature, Mc Cluskey focuses on an anthropological mode of knowing, which she calls a ‘meta-narrative’. As part of framework, the author uses James Scott’s notion of practices of the ‘metis’ and ‘public and hidden transcripts’, that implies a rapid knowledge adaptation to unpredictable events, in order to examine practices of day-to-day life. In that line, Mc Cluskey based on the conceptions of Scott’s notions, offers a substitute approach to the examination of the ‘appropriation of humanitarianism, generosity and solidarity as a form of security’. Additionally, the author also uses Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality and ‘caring bio politics’, that highlights a correlation between practices of conduct (or counter-conduct) and Scott’s idea of public and hidden transcripts. By doing so the author is enabled to examine power relations and a type of governmentality, by exploring and articulating the national myth of ‘moral exceptionalism’ and ‘humanitarian superpowerfulness’ that constructed the ‘good citizen’ identity. The author also brings forward the concept of rättfärdig (righteousness), to the sense of ‘good’ and noble’ that echoed the Swedish asylum policy.
“From Righteousness to Far Right provides a very interesting and innovative anthropological rethinking of critical security studies”
Mc Cluskey focuses her work on the small village in southern Sweden, called Öreby, where Syrian refugees were resettled in 2013. Sweden is perceived by the author as one of the most humanitarian nations in the Western world and morally exceptional, reflecting this notion of righteousness as part of the ‘national myth’. The author conducted 19 months of fieldwork, where she was working as a translator and interpreter for a grass root NGO—Friends of Syria—founded for the purposes of assisting and supporting the refugees to settle into life in Sweden. In addition, the author also conducted interview with volunteers, figureheads and refugees, giving her the opportunity to witness the initial warmth welcoming between the villagers and the refugees. However, what Mc Cluskey was also able to observe is a gradual transformation of this attitude of hospitality to a more hostile one and a slippery notion of solidarity. What was previously perceived as a deemed taboo, later has been normalised around a frame that portrays the refugee as a national treat and calls for measures of restricting migration. And what appeared to be micro practices under the banner of righteousness and a sense of decency evolved to narratives of obligation of reciprocity as acknowledgements of the villagers’ generosity.
Mc Cluskey argues that it is these micro physics and micro practices that empowered a far-right narrative—rather than grand ideology—that can explain the political transformation on the ground. The attitudes of originally ‘good’ and ’decent’ villagers who embraced righteousness shifted from the Swedish values of morality, equality, solidarity and humanitarianism to a new framing of refugees as threatening, unwelcome, and undesirable. As the welcoming mind set shifted to one of rejection, the discourse of integration was replaced by notions of violence, and the relationship between solidary and security became more complex. In the field, Mc Cluskey found practices of scepticism, hostility, and rising concerns of the ‘threat’ refugees were posing against the ‘Swedish way’—embracing the dividing narrative of ‘othering’.
According to Mc Cluskey, the alteration can be aggravated by a notion of compassion fatigue on part of the villagers that lead to a microphysics of outrage. This, along with the moral panics around alleged violent behaviour of refugees and an evolving discussion on the exploitation of the Swedish welfare by the Syrians, has contributed to this shift on what was considered an acceptable behaviour towards refugees. For the author it is these moral panics that prove the coexistence of ‘hidden and public transcripts’ and the coexistence of practices of ‘benevolence and violence’. What is worth mentioned is that by the time Mc Cluskey finished the fieldwork, the relationships between the villagers and the refugees had been scattered.
What Mc Cluskey argues in the case of Öreby, can be perceived as a mirror example of what was actually taking place in Sweden at the time. Looking at the general election results in 2014, the far right party of Sweden Democrats doubled its support and gained 12.86% of the popular votes and thereby becoming the third largest party in the country. The party also manage to attract a quarter of the votes in the village of Öreby. In 2015, Sweden reformed its open-door asylum policy to all Syrian refugees arriving at the border, and reverted it to the ‘EU minimum’, highlighting a more restrictive asylum policy.
What Mc Cluskey achieves through this political-anthropological analytical approach of micro practices is to provide new insights on the examination of issues of security, not just in a local but also in a national and an international level.
The author in the concluding chapter acknowledges the impact of the refugee crisis and its influence on the securitisation of migration debate. Which of course also includes stringent migration policies and the far right. What Mc Cluskey achieves through this political-anthropological analytical approach of micro practices is to provide new insights on the examination of issues of security, not just in a local but also in a national and an international level. This is one of the main contributions of the book, which leads to an exploration of the connection between critical security studies and anthropology and therefore to a broader recognition of the significance of micro scale practices in the understanding of world politics. With this interdisciplinary encounter, Mc Cluskey subsidises to multiple disciplines, not only the expected security studies, migration studies, critical security studies, international relations, Scandinavian studies and sociology but also politics and methodological approaches in social sciences.
Reflecting on the increasing discourse for more restricting policies towards migrants and refugees, along with stronger border controls, as a response to the refugee crisis, the book is appropriate timely. What it does, is bringing the sense of politics back to the core essence of interactions among people, moving away from the traditional political science approach. Mc Cluskey’s findings can be observed being unfolded on a daily basis: from ongoing situations in host countries of the Mediterranean, to the illegalisation of pro-refugee activism missions, even to the recent events in Greece (February 2020) with the government choosing to replace refugee camps with detention centres and with scuffles to break out between police and locals what attempt to stop any new construction for refugees. Therefore, refugees being seen as a ‘threat’ by locals, who have shifted their meaning of ‘normal’ and ‘decent’ response to the crisis to a more excluding approach, can be applied to cases beyond the Swedish village of Öreby, complementing the initial intention of the author.
There are some noticeable points of the book worth of additional discussion. The first one is the use of concepts and terms. For instance, there is no differentiation between the term refugee and migrant. From the reading it appears that both are interpreted as identical in terms of meaning, but a clarification in the beginning of the book could have been useful. Especially since, even in the case of Sweden, there are different practices both in political and day-to-day level, that separates this population in two different groups. Similarly, from the first pages of the book the author makes clear that there is a relative understanding of the term of ‘far right’ among people, however, the clarification of how the term is used is not clearly justified. The interpretation of the term ‘far right’ in line with broader practices that promote stricter refugee policies or note some similarities with the political discourse of parties like the Sweden Democrats, is adequate. It is not clear if the author’s intention is to avoid entering the debate of labelling the ‘far right’ but taken the fact that the specific research focuses on the day-to-day practices and experiences, it would have been really valuable to add an extra layer of analysis on the ethnographic data, that conceptualises ‘far right’ beyond the stereotypical frame of what ‘far right’ is alleged to be. Additionally, although there is rich information on the theory of Scott, it is not clear to the reader how the terms of ‘public and hidden transcripts’ or ‘merit’ is used for the purposes of the research, therefore further conceptualisation is required. This is also connected to a more methodological point. A stronger operationalisation in line with a stronger conceptualisation would be useful as it will offer a strengthening of the argument and a vibrant interpretation and discussion through the text.
Moreover, what is thought-provoking is the additional future research this book inspires. The author, in her narrative discusses peoples’ attitudes in terms of solidarity, generosity, humanitarianism and righteousness in the name of the morality of Swedish national myth. However, what is missing from the study is the intake of the villagers in Öreby of this moral perception of being ‘good’ and ‘decent’ in the time of the change in their behaviour. Finally, while Mc Cluskey brings the focus to micro practices, something that have been ignored by the majority of the studies in the field, what would have been really causative is the study of both high politics and day-to-day practices in a comparative or complementary way. In other words, examine the discourse and practices of far right in both institutional and grass root level. Lastly, exploring additional cases along Sweden, in local and national level, can provide a rich insight into an international scale.
From Righteousness to Far Right provides a very interesting and innovative anthropological rethinking of critical security studies. The work provides a very thorough study that could be stimulating not only for academics, but also for public audience.
Edited by Marieke de Goede, Esmé Bosma and Polly Pallister-Wilkins
Secrecy and Methods in Security Research, edited by Marieke de Goede, Esmé Bosma and Polly Pallister-Wilkins, promises to be a long-lasting contribution to the field of critical security studies (CSS) but also to the broader social-scientific debate on the methodological challenges of researching secrecy. CSS has long been dealing with questions regarding the politics of methods and the challenges that open, interpretative research poses.[i] This volume adds a specific focal point and discusses these questions with the specific focus on ‘secrecy.’ The collection’s seventeen chapters contain contributions on a wide variety of issues, and I will focus my discussion on a few themes that run through the whole volume rather than summarising each individual chapter. Chapters discuss ‘secrecy’ sites, such as a former atomic weapons research facility (Walters and Luscombe), as well as the difficulties to access ‘secret’ files or institutions (Belcher and Martin, Schwell, Stavrianakis). ‘Secrecy’ also plays out when we simply cannot get intelligible information and assessment of for example complex algorithms (Straube) or expert knowledge (de Goede). It becomes clear that the reason for the presence of secrecy vary, sometimes they are constitutive of the object itself (Walters and Luscombe) while at other times secrecy emerges because of actors trying to deny access, as in the case of Chinese security policy (Nyman). No reader should skip the introduction where the editors describe the purpose of the volume as an attempt to “develop ways to encircle, observe, document and analyse what secrecy does in practice.” (p.4). Secrecy is thus not only understood as something that is hidden but also as something productive—secrecy generates a certain kind of politics.
“The volume succeeds in giving insights into a variety of research methodologies and at the same time give a kaleidoscopic insight into how secrecy shapes contemporary security practices”
While ‘secrecy’ is the common interest of the volume, each chapter draws out different aspects of the concept by raising quite different questions about methods, methodology, and empirical aspects. For example, Jonna Nyman reflects not only on her own experience in getting access to Chinese security practices but also introduces the reader to the method of visual ethnography as one tool to reflect on the (in)visibility of everyday security actors. She demonstrates exceptionally well how her informants made previous invisible security issues such as the vulnerability in health care visible to her the researcher. Nyman also discusses one of the core themes of the volume namely the question of access. Most often being external to a research field makes access difficult and as many chapters demonstrate, access to (secret) security sites is difficult. Nyman however also points out how being (visibly) a foreigner in China allowed her to take pictures of sensitive sites and made crossing borders sometimes even easier. In this case, being an external actor granted advantages, whereas often the emphasis lies on the difficulties of external access.
Another theme concerns the role of luck, coincidence or chance that is present in many chapters. Jonathan Luke Austin assigns coincidence a large role in the direction his research project evolved. Austin describes how developing relationships with informants was important but how ultimately one conversation shaped the empirical direction of his project and led him to research torturers. The focus on this aspect was not planned but emerged incidentally out of his fieldwork. Making the role of arbitrariness and chance visible is crucial for several reasons: First, it decreases the risk of reading the chapters in this volume as a ‘how-to’ manual by emphasising the contingency of all research projects but especially those that rely on ethnographic methods. Second, it relieves the researcher of making decisions that will ultimately determine the success or failure of one’s project (as if such ‘ultimate decision’ ever existed). Third, it is a welcome realistic insight into how research projects develop over time and how initial research interest and scope can always change. The volume overall succeeds in highlighting the two aspects important for open research: luck and chance but also methodical tools and reflection. A welcome addition to the existing methods discussion is the emphasis on writing as a crucial part of research methods. Most chapters mention it at least in a side note and the chapters by de Goede and by Rappert are very explicit in reflecting on the process of writing as part of the production of scholarly knowledge. The emphasis on writing also ties in with the well-developed notions of reflexivity in many chapters. Researching sensitive security sites and state institutions challenges the researcher to reflect on her own position towards the field. The chapters by de Goede and by Grassiani both engage with the question of what it means to study ‘those you oppose’. The short chapters only give a brief insight into these complex questions but hopefully encourage more research along those lines.
Oliver Belcher and Lauren Martin raise the important issue of how ‘secrecy’ is not only a side-effect of security practices but also a constitutive part of these practices. The authors describe their work on detention facilities in the US. They describe the difficulties of getting access to an institution that is – in theory – governed by abstract and neutral administrative rules which are, however, in practice constantly changing and difficult to navigate. Students of similar sites might also find many useful ideas of how to approach ‘secret’ documents and get access to sites such as detention centers or prisons. The authors emphasise that researchers need to adapt their methods in every research project—a sentiment shared across the volume. This is certainly not a new point, but serves an important pedagogical function in such a volume that aims at helping students with their firsts larger research projects. The volume deals with this tension nicely by on the one hand giving insights into very specific research projects (thereby preventing a ‘cookbook’[ii] mentality to methods) and on the other hand providing general guidelines summarised in tables and boxes (adhering to a more textbookish aesthetics).
The volume succeeds in giving insights into a variety of research methodologies and at the same time give a kaleidoscopic insight into how secrecy shapes contemporary security practices, its technologies, and—most importantly—its politics. The volume will be of interest not only to scholars of security sites but it will hopefully attract attention outside the field. The short chapters and the description of various research project make it a great addition for any syllabus on research methods in IR.
[I]See for instance the contribution of Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, eds., Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, 1st ed. (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Claudia Aradau et al., eds., Critical Security Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis, The New International Relations Studies (London: Routledge, 2015); Mark B Salter and Can E Mutlu, Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2012).
[ii]Anna Leander, ‘From Cookbooks to Encyclopaedias in the Making: Methodological Perspectives for Research of Non-State Actors and Processes’, in Methodological Approaches for Studying Non-State Actors in International Security. Theory and Practice, ed. Andreas Kruck and Andrea Schneiker (Lodon: Routledge, 2017), 231–40.
